Your ideal landscape can become reality by choosing the appropriate plants. Instead of depending solely on blooming annuals for color creation, use foliage, berries, and bark from low maintenance trees, shrubs and ground covers instead.
Nothing evokes Florida more than palm trees, and Hillsborough County’s climate makes them an essential element in any landscape.
Palm Trees
Palm trees bring exotic allure to any West-Central Florida landscape, but they require specific seasonal care in order to thrive. By keeping up with best practices for your palms and consulting lawn care experts, you can ensure your tropical wonders continue blooming long into autumn and beyond. You can learn more at Tampa Tree Service’s website here: https://tampatreeservice.org/
The stately Foxtail Palm is an attractive showpiece, boasting a sleek gray trunk topped with bright green fronds that resemble a fox’s tail. Perfect for home and commercial landscaping spaces alike, its moderate salt tolerance also makes this tropical beauty an asset.
Pruning tropical palm trees during their dormant winter seasons is crucial. Pruning conserves energy and allows the tree to redirect resources towards springtime growth. Be sure to remove diseased, broken or damaged fronds as well as suckers or competing branches from your palm trees and use this opportunity to apply mulch around their base for optimal soil health.
Container Gardens
Florida’s climate provides ideal conditions for many tropical plants, including palm trees. Although they’re a familiar feature of Tampa’s landscape, you can use palms as decorative accents in your own yard as well.
Choose shade trees with broad canopies to provide cool outdoor living spaces in Tampa during the heat and humidity of summertime Florida. Paper birch, tulip poplar, silver maple and American sweetgum trees make great examples.
Tampa’s climate offers ideal growing conditions for other shade trees such as cypress, loquat, oak and Southern red cedar – in particular the loquat which blooms between October and February and produces sweet yellow-orange skinned fruit in early spring.
Use colorful yet low-maintenance shrubs, ground covers and vines to complement the tropical trees of Florida with foliage, berries, flowers and bark. Low maintenance Florida gardens could benefit from planting ti plants, ixora magnolia loquat or holly as low-maintenance options.
Evergreens
Tampa’s tropical landscapes take advantage of an assortment of evergreen trees. One popular species is holly, which features dark green leaves with round red berries. This fast-growing tree thrives in Tampa and makes a beautiful addition to any shade garden.
Florida Elm Tree: Another Shade Tree to ConsiderThe Florida elm offers shade while growing into a beautiful centerpiece, making it an excellent option for suburban yards in inland neighborhoods such as Davis Island or South Tampa where more traditional homes may exist. Unfortunately, its pollen can produce allergenic reactions, so planting it far enough away from houses prevents root damage during storms or hurricanes.
The bald cypress tree is another shade tree that excels in Tampa. Native of southern swamps and rivers, this species thrives in wet soil and displays stunning orange-cinnamon colors in autumn. You can use it as either a foundation plant or hedge row.
Irrigation
Careful planning will enable a beautiful landscape to flourish on your Tampa property. While Florida’s tropical storms, extreme heat and humidity, periodic droughts, and pests may pose threats to this objective, such challenges are easily manageable with proper attention paid.
Shade trees make an eye-catching focal point in any yard and provide a cost-cutting measure during Tampa summers. With dense canopies and deep roots, shade trees act like natural air conditioners for your home – as well as slowing wind currents, protecting gardens from tropical storms, and soaking up stormwater during rainfall events.
The sycamore tree (Platanus occidentalis) grows into an impressive, sturdy shade tree that provides lovely shade to any property it stands on, providing habitat for birds, squirrels and other animals that visit it as well as homeowners in Tampa who love this popular shade tree choice for large yards. River birches (Betula nigra) can tolerate wet conditions more readily while growing quickly over their lifespans – another excellent shade option in large yards in Tampa!